I don't think you get good leaders if financial compensation is all they care about to stay. I will bet Tim Cook loves what he does at Apple and would likely st

I don't think you get good leaders if financial compensation is all they care about to stay. I will bet Tim Cook loves what he does at Apple and would likely stay even for $1. He has more than enough money already. A good example is this: Greece and Italy paid their politicians best in all of Europe, while Norway pays their politicians worst. Yet it seems Greece and Italy got stuck with the worst politicians. I don't think that is an accident. With too much focus on compensation, you just attract greedy and corrupt people rather than people who want to make a difference. I do think CEOs should get properly compensated, but the idea that at CEO magically performs 10x better because you pay him $10 million instead of $1 million is so absurd that you have to be a libertarian to believe it ;-) Human motivation cannot be reduced to a simple question of monetary compensation. Research into this suggest that human motivation in relation to compensation works more in terms of inflection points. If your pay is so low you feel underappriciated, you will not perform well. Once salary gets high enough that you feel appreciated, further increases is not going to increase performance. People don't hold back performance until they get paid a billion. There is a threshold at which point people will perform as well as you can expect from compensation alone. Beyond that other facts will matter: Joy of working with your co-workers, belief in the mission, interesting tasks etc.